ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses and criticises Sugden’s (2018) claim about who the proper addressees of normative economics are. Contra Sugden, this chapter argues that the public reason model of normative economics is not committed to the view from nowhere. The ‘view from somewhere’ adopted by Sugden’s preferred contractarian model is also not the only alternative. The chapter will present the social choice model of public reasoning as a general model that combines the framework of standard normative economics with a commitment to a respect for persons principle that is constitutive of the public reason tradition in moral and political philosophy. This particular variant of the public reasoning model is best seen as an approach implementing the ‘view from everywhere’. While in Sugden’s model the addressees are agents defined as continuous loci of responsibility and who value opportunities, in the social choice model the addressees are persons defined by their values and personal conceptions of the good.
